Anna Politkovskaya Biography

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (1958–2006) joined a long
list of dissidents who died because of their outspoken criticism of
their country's regime. A war reporter who chronicled Russian
attempts to subdue extremists in the breakaway republic of Chechnya,
she remained objective in describing the ghastly atrocities committed
by both sides. Politkovskaya further warned that Russia seemed to be
reverting to a Soviet-style climate of fear under the leadership of
President Vladimir Putin, a former spy. "I have no hope left in
my soul," she told Andrew Osborn in Britain's
Independent
newspaper. "Only a change of leadership would allow me to have
hope but it's a political winter." Less than two years
later, she became the victim of what appeared to be an assassination.

Politkovskaya was the daughter of two diplomats of Ukrainian heritage
whose loyalty to Soviet Russia and the Communist Party was deemed secure
enough to give them a highly coveted foreign mission in the West. In the
strict, one-party authoritarian rule back in the Soviet era, only party
members who did not appear to be candidates for defection were granted
permission to travel or live in the West. Politkovskaya's parents
were posted to the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where she
was born on August 30, 1958. Her privileged background was a vastly
different one from that of the man who would become her greatest foe,
Russian president Vladimir Putin

(born 1952). Putin's autobiography recounted a St. Petersburg
childhood in a vermin-infested communal apartment before he rose through
the ranks of the KGB, the Soviet Union's secret police and
intelligence agency. Politkovskaya, by contrast, "was part of the
elite," noted the
Guardian
's David Hearst. "For her family, Vladimir Putin is not a
distant object of fear and veneration, but a former KGB staffer rather too
lowly for them to have come across socially."

Worked for Aeroflot

Politkovskaya studied journalism at Moscow State University, and went to
work for the national daily newspaper
Izvestia
when she graduated in 1980. She later worked for Aeroflot, the
state-owned airline of the Soviet Union, and her position with its company
newspaper came with an all-access airline pass, good for free domestic
travel anywhere Aeroflot touched down. Politkovskaya put it to good use,
and the experience transformed her from a member of the privileged class
familiar with only the main urban centers and summer resort areas of the
Soviet sphere to a well-informed journalist. "Thanks to this I saw
the whole of our huge country," she said in an interview with the
Guardian
's James Meek. "I was a girl from a diplomatic family, a
reader, a bit of a swot [nerd]; I didn't know life at all."

Energized by the era of reform ushered in after 1985 by new Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev (born 1931), Politkovskaya eagerly returned to daily
journalism once press censorship began to abate, taking a job with a
pro-democracy newspaper
Obshchaya gazeta
. Founded in August of 1991—the same month that the Soviet
communist regime finally crumbled—the weekly newspaper was an ideal
forum for Politkovskaya, and she made her name as a journalist in the late
1990s when she began reporting from Chechnya. This mountainous region in
the North Caucasus had a long history of enmity with its Russian overlords
dating back to the early nineteenth century. In the early years of
post-Soviet Russia, there had been a small war for independence that
pitted Chechen rebels against Russian federal troops. But public pressure
on Russian president Boris Yeltsin (born 1931), fueled by the new press
freedoms available to media outlets like
Obshchaya gazeta
, resulted in a withdrawal of Russia's troops and a 1997 peace
agreement that recognized Chechnya as an independent republic. Succeeding
Yeltsin in late 1999, Putin ordered the deployment of more troops to quell
internal disorder within Chechnya between the government and Islamic
extremists; there had also been a series of Moscow bombings in 1999 that
were blamed on Chechen terrorists, but journalists like Politkovskaya
began to suspect that the tragedy had been instigated by hardline Russian
conservatives as an excuse to subdue Chechnya for good. This renewal of
hostilities came to be known as the Second Chechen War.

By then Politkovskaya was a columnist for
Novaya gazeta
, another liberal newspaper, and continued her reporting from Chechnya.
Her stories were critical of human rights excesses on both sides,
including one gripping tale about the mystery surrounding a mass grave
discovered near a Russian military base; the bodies were possibly civilian
casualties, and land mines had been planted to prevent their retrieval.
Politkovskaya already had made some prominent enemies because of her
journalistic exposés, but for this one she was taken into custody
and accused of spying on behalf of Shamil Basayev, the Chechen warlord.
For three days in February of 2001 she was kept in a pit with no food or
water. Later that year she was forced to flee Russia for a time when
rumors reached her that one police captain, accused of human rights abuses
in her stories, wanted her dead. Her aptly titled first book,
A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya
, appeared in English translation that same year.

Trusted Negotiator at Moscow Hostage Scene

In October of 2002 Politkovskaya became a participant in a news story
herself, when a group of heavily armed Chechen rebels stormed a Moscow
theater and took 850 hostages. They demanded a pullout of Russian troops
from Chechnya. Politkovskaya asked to meet with the hostage-takers, hoping
to secure food and water for the actors, musicians, and theatergoers being
held. As she wrote in a report filed for
Novaya gazeta
, she waited long minutes before being allowed to meet with a senior
commando, and feared for her life. "Masks come and go, the time
fading away grips the heart with foreboding, and the senior still
doesn't come. Maybe they'll just shoot us now?"
Finally, she met with a leader of the group, who apologized to her for the
semi-automatic weapon he was carrying. "Even without these
explanations, I can see it all already—he's from the
generation of Chechens that has
been fighting for its entire life," she wrote. She was given
permission to bring in juice and water, but as the standoff neared the
three-day mark, a special forces unit of the Russian Army stormed the
building with the help of a powerful gas that was probably a nerve agent;
all 42 hostage-takers died, along with 129 civilians.

Worse incidents ensued after the Moscow theater siege. In September of
2004 another group of Chechen rebels took an elementary school hostage in
the southern Russian town of Beslan. The children had been assembled for a
ceremony in the schoolyard, marking the first day of class for the year,
when 32 masked men arrived and began herding the teachers, parents, and
children into the gymnasium. On the third day, a battle erupted between
Russian military forces and the hostage-takers, and more than 300 of the
1,200 hostages died. Upon hearing of the crisis, Politkovskaya immediately
boarded a flight to Beslan in order to help negotiate a safer outcome, but
became violently ill after drinking a cup of tea en route. She believed
she was poisoned.

By 2005
Novaya gazeta
—one of whose owners was Gorbachev—remained among the few
independent media outlets that had not been forced out of business by
Putin's government. Politkovskaya's third book,
Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy
, had not even been published in Russia in 2004, though it was
appreciatively reviewed when it appeared in English translation in 2006.
In it, she chronicled Putin's rise to national political power, and
analyzed his strategy for courting Western powers—he counted
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush among
his allies—while cracking down on hard-won civil liberties at home
in the name of fighting terrorism at home and abroad. Much of the text
reiterated what she had already written in articles about him, asserted
Osborn. "Politkovskaya does what few other Russian commentators
dare and steps over an invisible line, mocking Mr. Putin in an intensely
personal way; comparing him to Soviet leader Josef Stalin … and to
a bland, over-promoted spy who should never have been elevated to the
dizzy Kremlin heights."

Death Prompted Outrage

On October 5, 2006, Politkovskaya gave a radio interview in which she
discussed an upcoming story for
Novaya gazeta
, an exposé on torture practices linked to a militia unit
controlled by Chechnya's Putin-friendly prime minister, Ramzan
Kadyrov. She planned to file the story on Saturday, October 7, but was
found shot to death in her apartment building in central Moscow just
before 5 p.m. A Makarov pistol, which in Russia is often used for contract
killings, and four shell casings were found near her body; the four
bullets to her head also pointed to evidence that it had been an
assassination rather than a random act of violence. Police seized her
computer, and though a fragment of her story was published several days
later that included stills from a grainy video depicting Kadyrovite
militia personnel torturing suspects, other important photographs were
lost.

News of Politkovskaya's death prompted consternation on an
international level. Heads of state from Europe, as well as Blair and
Bush, issued official statements questioning her untimely death. Her
supporters, as well as human-rights activists around the world, called it
a political assassination. Even the
New York Times
editorial page weighed in, remarking that she was one of a long line of
recent suspicious deaths of Putin's foes, and the newspaper
ventured that "it would be hard to imagine that Mr. Putin's
Kremlin, swollen with oil riches and power, could not find those who
ordered her murder or so many others."

Putin did promise a full investigation of her death, but commented also
that she was a figure of "minor" importance. The number of
mourners who turned out for her funeral on October 10 seemed to contradict
that claim. Nearly a thousand paid their respects on a rainy Tuesday,
among them Western diplomats, fellow journalists, and ordinary Muscovites.
One of those in attendance was
Time International
's Moscow correspondent Yuri Zarakhovich, who explained in his
report that funerals were one expression of dissidence in the repressive
Soviet era. "Moscow had not, until last week, seen a mass dissident
demonstration for years," wrote Zarakhovich. "Nor had cities
like St. Petersburg, or Yekaterinburg in the Urals, where rallies all paid
homage to Politkovskaya." The
Time
journalist also commented that that few mourners at
Politkovskaya's burial "would have expected that, 15 years
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they would have occasion to once
again feel like dissidents in the face of a too-powerful state."

Linked to Litvinenko

Politkovskaya left two adult children, the product of a marriage that had
ended because of her frequent travels to Chechnya and the danger it posed
to her. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (born 1954) met with her
son 10 days later on visit to Moscow, and also met with the editor of
Novaya gazeta
, Dmitry Muratov. Several weeks later, with her death still under
investigation, a former KGB agent and critic of Putin gave a statement
from his London hospital bed. Near death, Alexander Litvinenko
(1962–2006) blamed Putin for the mysterious illness that had caused
him to become deathly ill within a matter of days. Politkovskaya had met
with Litvinenko in London not long after her own suspicious illness in
2004, and Litvinenko had reportedly been investigating whether or not she
had been poisoned. Shortly before he fell ill, Litvinenko told a Chechen
website that he had come into possession of documents that linked officers
of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), the
successor to the KGB, to Politkovskaya's murder.